Monday, April 30, 2007

The Myth of Mirror Neurons?

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In an article in a special issue of Slate devoted to the brain (well worth checking over...I'll give some links to articles in the Sla...
4 comments:

This week's recording - Arabesque

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Debussy's first Arabesque, recorded on my Steinway B in Middleton Wisconsin.

Top-Down/Bottom-Up in Attention Control

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An elegant study from Buschman and Miller . Their abstract: Attention can be focused volitionally by "top-down" signals derived f...
Friday, April 27, 2007

Does Darwinism have to be depressing?

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Robert Wright, author of "The Moral Animal," argues no, in spite of the fact that evolutionary explanations boil our loftiest feel...
2 comments:

Which way are you wagging your tail?

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Blakeslee writes a review (PDF here ) of work by Vallortigara et al (PDF here ) on emotional asymmetric tail wagging by dogs that is a furt...
2 comments:
Thursday, April 26, 2007

Crisis in connectivity

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I realized yet again how much my high speed internet access has become a part of my extended ego when on returning to Madison WI from Ft. La...

Is recursion a universal aspect of languages?

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The april 16 issue of The New Yorker magazine has an engaging essay (titled "The Interpreter") by John Colapinto describing the wo...
Wednesday, April 25, 2007

What Determines Winners?

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Experts in the entertainment industry and many other fields put great effort into predicting what people will like, what will sell. Great ...
1 comment:

Protocol based architectures.

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Doyle and Csete offer an interesting essay on "Rules of Engagement" in the recent issue of Nature Magazine. (PDF here ). Their su...
Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Evolution and Brain science shaping public discourse

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I want to mention and pass on two recent Op-Ed columns of David Brooks in the New York Times. He has done a commendable job of learning t...

Neuron competition during memory formation.

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Science Magazine summaries an article by Han et al. : Electrophysiological and cellular imaging studies show that only a portion of neurons...
Monday, April 23, 2007

Twin Valley Music - Debussy Reverie version II

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Now that I'm back with my Steinway B at the house on Twin Valley Road in Middleton Wisconsin, I'm starting to resume recording and p...
1 comment:

The social power of groups regulates their variability

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Here is the slightly edited abstract of a recent talk at the Univ. of Wisconsin by Markus Brauer, University de Clermont-Ferrand, "S...

Nyotaimori - the latest in thing for "Foodies"

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Two items in the food section of the 4/18 New York Times cracked me up, and I had to pass them on. California food styles, like its governo...
2 comments:
Friday, April 20, 2007

Representation of social concepts in superior anterior temporal cortex

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An interesting bit of work from Zahn et al. Their abstract: Social concepts such as "tactless" or "honorable" enable ...

A bizarre story - the parasite that lets cats eat rats

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From Sapolsky's lab at Stanford: The protozoan parasite Toxoplasma gondii blocks the innate aversion of rats for cat urine, instead pro...
1 comment:
Thursday, April 19, 2007

Egalitarian motives in humans

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Dawes et al. play some laboratory games that suggest important factors underlying the evolution of strong reciprocity and cooperation in hu...

Bipolar disorder - related to a disorder in the Clock gene?

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Coyle offers a review in the April 10 issues of PNAS of a paper by Roybal et al. showing that mutation of the clock gene in mice causes th...
1 comment:
Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Enhanced Visuospatial Cognition in Musicians

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Yet another piece on how the brains of musicans are different (I continue to be grateful for the apparent side effects of being a serious pi...

The Primate Lineage

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Two items on primates: John Noble Wilford does a nice review of the recent primatology meeting in Chicago in the NY Times science section 4/...